The white mouse who roared

Nancy Wake, who died on Sunday, was this country's most decorated service woman. Working with the French Resistance in World War II she saved the lives of countless refugees and downed Allied airmen. Peter FitzSimons recalls an extraordinary woman who knew no fear.

By Peter FitzSimons

9 August 2011 — 12:00am

NANCY Wake, who in 1943 was top of the Gestapo's most wanted list, was born in the back room of a dingy weatherboard shack in Wellington, New Zealand, the youngest of six children. It was the stuff of Wake family legend that the Maori midwife who delivered her had pointed out to her mother the thin veil of skin that covered the top of the child's head.

''This is what we call a kahu,'' the midwife said, softly tracing her finger across the fold, ''and it means your baby will always be lucky. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, the gods will look after her.''

But the benevolent beam of the gods was certainly not apparent early on, as she had the unhappiest of childhoods. Eight years younger than her closest sibling, she always felt isolated from the rest of the family, with the exception of her filmmaker father, Charles, whom she adored. However, shortly after the family moved to the Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay, when Wake was four years old, her father left for the United States and never returned.

The rest of her childhood was spent waging a kind of guerilla war against her mother and her siblings, which ended only when the high-spirited and highly strung Wake ran away from home when she was 16. For two years, under an assumed name, she worked as a nurse near Mudgee until she turned 18 and it was safe to return to Sydney, where she got a job with a shipping firm and lived independently of her family.

A timely bequest from a New Zealand aunt enabled her to travel to the US and England. She arrived in London in 1932 and began a course in journalism, a career that had her living in Paris a little over a year later, reporting events in Europe for the readers of the Hearst newspaper chain, including the violent rise of Nazism, which she abhorred.

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Throughout the 1930s, Wake essentially lived two lives: by day she was a hard-working journalist, by night a ravishing beauty living Parisian nightlife to the full.

In 1936, she met a Marseilles millionaire by the name of Henri Fiocca, married him just after World War II began and settled into his Marseilles mansion, leaving journalism behind. As Hitler's army crossed the French border, Wake was appalled at the collaborationists who advocated living as comfortably as possible under the Nazi yoke.

A short time later she became a courier for the local Resistance movement, carrying everything from simple messages to high-tech radio parts to well-secreted cells of partisans. She used her native cunning and beauty - being openly flirtatious - to overcome the suspicions of German guards to get through checkpoints.

Wake was so successful with the Resistance that she soon graduated to taking groups of refugees and downed Allied pilots or Jewish families from one ''safe house'' to another until they reached the base of the Pyrenees, where other guides would get them across into neutral Spain.

So busy was she that the Gestapo came to call her ''the White Mouse'', in part, it seems, because whenever they felt they had this beautiful woman they had heard about cornered, she was able to disappear. Once, the Gestapo almost caught her - but she was able to escape while bullets whistled around her ears, before getting over the Pyrenees herself.

Her French husband, Henri, was not so fortunate. After being arrested by the Gestapo he refused to divulge her whereabouts or give an account of her activities and was executed. ''I will go to my grave regretting that,'' Wake told me, ''for Henri was the love of my life.''

She made her way back to Britain, where she underwent 16 weeks of retraining by Britain's famous Special Operations Executive, a Churchill-inspired organisation devoted to co-ordinating and supplying resistance movements across Europe. She finished their course as an expert in explosives, weaponry, hand-to-hand combat and how to prosper behind enemy lines.

At 1am on March 31, 1943, she was parachuted back into France into the forests of l'Auvergne, just to the north of Clermont-Ferrand, where about 7000 partisans were to be found in many separate groups. Her mission was to judge the strength of the various bands and radio London as to what was needed in terms of munitions.

If Wake - known to the partisans by her code name of ''Madame Andree'' - was impressed with their fighting qualities and discipline, the skies would rain guns and grenades at midnight.

Despite the amount of power this gave her, she was often less than welcomed by the partisans when she first made contact, as they could not believe that they had been sent ''une femme''; they simply refused to treat her with respect.

She decided to teach them respect. She would engage the partisan leaders in drinking contests, and when she was the ''last man'' left standing at dawn - and she always was - they would look at her with new eyes.

When D-Day came, on June 6, 1944, Wake's life became a blur of ambushing Germans, narrow escapes, full-blown attacks, bridge-blowing, train-wrecking and all the rest as she helped co-ordinate her bands to thwart all attempts to bring German battalions through her region to reinforce their forces at Normandy.

As a warrior she was fearless. ''Madame Andree is braver than Jacques,'' a partisan once said to a British officer who was an SOE agent, ''and Jacques is the bravest of us all.''

On one raid, Wake killed an SS sentry with her bare hands to prevent him raising the alarm. She slit his throat. In another of her escapades, she rode more than 800 kilometres on a bicycle to replace codes her wireless operator had been forced to destroy during a German raid.

Wake's partisans acquitted themselves superbly in the months that followed and they were among the first to liberate the town of Vichy from Marshal Philippe Petain's collaborationists, who had made it their capital.

Wake was also among the first into the newly liberated Paris and the pattern for her remaining years was set shortly afterwards.

One evening Wake was dining with friends in the reopened British Officers Club in Paris when she got into a blue - not for the first or last time - with an uppity waiter. This waiter thought he had won the confrontation by saying he would much prefer to serve the Germans than the likes of her and her noisy friends.

She reflected on this for perhaps half a second before leaping to her feet and knocking him senseless with a right hook. As she recounted, as soon as another alarmed waiter rushed to his fallen colleague with a glass of brandy, she grabbed it, drained it in two seconds, said ''Merci'', and walked on out the door. That was Nancy Wake.

For her courage and feats during the war she was awarded numerous bravery medals, including the Congressional Medal of Freedom by the US, the George Medal from Britain and three top French honours: the Legion d'Honneur, the Croix de Guerre, and the Medaille de la Resistance.

However, there was controversy for the next five decades as she was denied a medal by the Australian government on the simple grounds that she was not fighting for any of the Australian services during the war. Despite that, in her latter years, the federal government did contact her from time to time to see if she would accept a medal and was consistently rejected. When she was asked about this in April of 2000, she was typically blunt. ''The last time there was a suggestion of giving me [an Australian medal], I told the government they could stick their medals where the monkey stuck his nuts. The thing is if they gave me a medal now, it wouldn't be given with love so I don't want anything from them. They can bugger off!''

(The Australian government eventually made Wake a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2004, and two years later she was awarded the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association's highest honour, the RSA Badge in Gold. Her medals are displayed at the Australian War Memorial Museum in Canberra.)

It was a typical outburst. Wake's volatility and outbursts of rage - which had been so effective in the war - did not stop with the peace and were, alas, less suited to it. Indeed, a lot about Wake was ill-suited to regular civilian life and she was keenly aware of it.

''After the war ended,'' she said in a newspaper interview in 1983, ''it was dreadful because you've been so busy and then it all just fizzles out …''

What to do with all her energy and fame? Why not politics? Twice she fought elections for the Liberal Party and twice came perilously close to defeating the Labor stalwart Dr Herbert Evatt. Nevertheless, she took it as being twice rejected and developed a great antipathy for all things political.

She settled for being a homemaker for her second husband, the garrulous former RAF pilot John Forward, whom she had met in the mid-1950s and became a mid-ranking executive with an Australian textiles firm.

Generally the two were very happy and he came to cope with being with a woman who was only ever a hair-trigger away from hilarity or high-octane fury.

In the mid-1980s, they moved from Sydney to retire in the sunny, friendly town of Port Macquarie, where they lived happily until John died in 1997. She moved to live in London in 2001.

I first came across her in 2000, when her great friend and protector, a Port Macquarie pharmacist by the name of Jim Cowley, asked me to write a biography of Wake that would help raise the $10,000 he estimated she needed to get an airline ticket back to Europe one last time to see her surviving friends. I declined, but agreed I would at least like to meet her and interview her for The Sydney Morning Herald - and quickly changed my mind about writing the book.

I came to know her well in the course of writing the book. If there was a lesson for me in the exercise, it was that the spirit of the woman who, in 1944, had raided the Gestapo headquarters at Montlucon and unleashed such carnage, was still entirely intact, even if it was now encased in rather fragile flesh.

Still, once we had both worked out that she was 10 times the man I would ever be, things smoothed out and she had less reason to demonstrate that spirit. Another thing that never ceased to amaze me was that her capacity to consume alcohol had not diminished with the passing of the years.

Was she an alcoholic? If that is defined as absolutely needing to drink heavily every day of your life, then probably not. But when she was ''on it'', she could have drunk for Australia and, on such occasions, her hair-trigger was always more prone to fury.

In November 2001 she returned to Britain, hoping to meet up with her surviving friends from the war. This was despite warnings that there were few left and she might find it difficult to be away from her support structure in Australia. She settled in London's Stafford Hotel, which was always her favourite.

There were reports that, at the end, she was penniless. I do not know the truth of that, but can only report that in long phone conversations she always denied it. I also know for a fact that between the sales of the biography, the e-book rights, the film rights and the audio rights, she earned about $200,000 in the last couple of years.

One more thing. ''Whatever happens,'' she said at our first meeting, ''I know what I want to happen to my body when I'm gone.''

And what is that?

''I want to be cremated,'' she said, with barely controlled emotion. ''And I want my ashes to be scattered over the mountains where I fought with the Resistance. That will be good enough for me.''